You Can’t Improve Workplace Morale by Force

In preparation for a pub quiz event in Brooklyn with The Economist magazine next week, I came across an interesting article in the current issue. Without giving too much away, one of the 50 states in the union has imposed a mandatory scripted “telephone salutation” which all state employees are now required to cheerfully recite upon answering their phones.

As the article states, the enhanced hello is intended to not only help “sell” the state as a beacon of positive energy to callers near and far, but to boost the morale of state workers as well.

Call me crazy, but this is just a colossally dumb idea.

How is a mandated phone greeting supposed to help employees feel better about their workplace and themselves? It’s demeaning, degrading, and condescending to make your employees recite some silly mantra, which is completely unnatural and makes your people sound silly to whomever is on the other end of the line.

When I was pledging my college fraternity a half a lifetime ago, one of the many humiliations the other newbies and I were forced to undergo was the mandatory phone answer in our dorm rooms (there were no cell phones back then- shocking, I know). Whenever the phone rang, the answer had to be the same:

“Hello, this is AEPi pledge David – with whom am I speaking?”

Now, don’t forget- back then, there was no caller ID, either – so we never knew if the person calling us was a lab partner, a roommate’s mother, or one of the fraternity brothers telling us to come down to the house and clean. That meant we HAD to use this stupid, debasing phone answer EVERY single time, or else there was hell to pay.

Now imagine that this is your JOB, for a state government agency no less – and you’re forced to answer the phone with a silly, pre-fab, faux-cheery hello, under penalty of disciplinary action.

Improved workplace morale, you say?

I think you’ve got the wrong number.